Home automation and remotely controlling appliances and other systems in homes is a growing field. Home automation examples include an alarm clock that automatically sets the correct time to wake up a user based on weather and traffic conditions, routing a video stream from a baby-sit camera to a user's remote business office, remotely identifying a person at the door of a user's home and opening the door accordingly, turning lights on and off, and adjusting the heating and air conditioning prior to a user's returning home, all through remote access systems. Generally, any dedicated or limited function consumer device containing at least one networked processor that can be remotely controlled is referred to as a networked appliance (NA).
Home automation introduces new security problems that must be addressed. If an attacker gains unauthorized access to home automation systems and networked appliances, the attacker can monitor movement in or around a house, determine when residents are home, and otherwise gain control over NAs in the victim's home. Using known passive network eavesdropping techniques, an attacker can determine the existence of certain appliances and the times and frequencies a user accesses these appliances, leaving the networked appliances vulnerable to replay and man-in-the-middle network attacks, as are known in the art. If the attacker can break the encryption used to hide the content of each message, the attacker can actually gain control of the networked appliances themselves. Thus, adequate security must be provided to prevent unauthorized eavesdropping of and access to networked appliances.
Previous security measures include the use of basic/digest authentication, secure sockets layer (SSL), transport layer security (TLS), and IPSec. However, these known security measures are not optimized for use with networked appliances because in networked appliance systems there is usually frequent communication between a relatively small set of entities. That is, the above mentioned security measures typically require several administrative message exchanges between the two communicating parties in order to establish authenticated and secure data communications. Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide network message security optimized against attackers of networked appliances and home automation systems. It would also be an advancement in the art to reduce the number of administrative messages required to establish authenticated and secure communications between two parties.